Meuse-Argonne cemetery, c. 1919 |
Daniel
Sargent's poem "Names" tenderly considers the thousands upon
thousands of inscriptions, the names of those who died in The Great War,
focusing on the simple names of two very ordinary men.
Names
To Leon Cathlin
....But
names are the things. The names are
everywhere.
Through
names I walk. The names, at them I
stare.
I am
beleaguered by them as at night
In a
city we are dazzled left and right
By
the fiery advertisements, and we see
No
city but the electricity….
…some
little group will pass
Seeking
their fathers sleeping in the grass.
"These
were our kin and yet they passed away."
A hundred years from now some archivist
A hundred years from now some archivist
Also
may read the names and make a list.
A
thousand years from now there still may be
A
road for goats into this privacy,
And
perhaps a singing visitor may come,
Perhaps
a child blue-berrying with blue thumb,
Who
cannot read, who may for all we know
Laugh
in the dialect of the Esquimaux.
And
yet the names were not for her and not
For
all the rest that wandered in this lot.
Whom
are they for? We do not have to guess.
Our
bones proclaim it in their stubbornness.
There's
One who knows our name as well as we:
He
badged our bones at birth with identity.
And
when He comes…--But look, but look: the sky
Now
blossoms like a morning glory on high.
"O
Lord of Hosts, in the glory Thou comest with,
Behold
us here: Joe Baker and John
Smith."
Daniel
Sargent, the author of this excerpt (the full text of the poem appears
in the 1962 volume Everything Happened) volunteered
to drive ambulance for the American Field Service in 1916, when America was a
neutral nation. When the US entered the war
in the spring of 1917, he enlisted with the doughboys and served at the battle
of Cantigy in May of 1918, America's first offensive in The Great War. He survived and returned home, becoming a published
poet and professor of English at Harvard. Many of his friends did not return.
Dan Sargent and Tingle Culbertson, with the American Ambulance Service |
I've
listened to the audiotape of Sargent's interview with Lyn MacDonald (he is
quoted in her book Roses of No Man's Land),
and I was struck by his charm and good humor, as well as by the note of sadness
that underlies his remembrances of the war and of his friends who died in battle. The poem "Names" gives voice to the
sorrow of that loss, as well as to the eternal hope that Sargent found during the war in
France, a faith that gave him purpose and meaning
for the rest of his life (he died at age 96 in 1987).
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